


she comes like fullest moon (on happy night)

by oh_kay



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a happy-ish ending, Canonical Character Death, Consent Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Episode: s03x03 Fireflies, Episode: s03x04 Unleashed, Episode: s03x07 Currents, F/M, poetic prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:24:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_kay/pseuds/oh_kay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jennifer might have fallen for a wrong man. Derek fell for a right woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she comes like fullest moon (on happy night)

**Author's Note:**

> Series of episode codas that I posted on [tumblr](http://kayfeatures.tumblr.com/tagged/daddy-issues-verse/chrono), here compiled in one story, seeing as they all take place in the same verse. I fully expect it to get jossed today, but I have a great fondness for innocent teacher Jennifer, so here we go.
> 
> As for the consent issues mentioned in tags: Derek and Jennifer have (not explicit) sex while in emotionally vulnerable state. They both consent, but their ability to do so may be viewed as impaired, so if it bothers you, you may wanna skip this story.
> 
> Title from One Thousand and One Nights translated by sir Richard F. Burton.

There’s wool in her mouth; she bit at her sleeve to avoid—screaming, crying, throwing up, she doesn’t know. But it makes her sick, sick to the bone, swelling up her tongue, getting stuck in her throat. She doesn’t think of spitting it out, of being able to breathe easily, of being able to say, loudly and clearly in her teacher voice, “I need help”. Of nobody coming.

Or, worse yet, of monsters coming, approaching, cornering her in.

Her father was a soldier; he used to pick her up and carry her out of the closet she was hiding in when the nightmares came. He had big hands. He had a deep, rough voice telling her there was nothing to be afraid of, silly little neurotic girl. She hated it—hated him, really, what an awful person she is—then; she hates it even more now. She was safe in her closet as much as she isn’t safe crouched behind a wobbly bookshelf, arms tight around her knees.

The air smells of dust and blood. She smells, she thinks, of fear.

*

_He won’t bite you, if you don’t show him you’re afraid, girl. Calm down!_

_I don’t like dogs._

_Don’t be rude, Jenny, good girls aren’t rude._

_I wanna go to mom, daddy. Mommy! Mommy, where are you?_

_Goddammit, Jennifer, stop squirming! This is my friend, and you’re making me ashamed. Bad girl!_

_*_

It gets worse, when he comes closer. The smell, and the fear, and everything, everything. “At least he won’t pick me up”, she thinks absurdly, and a laugh bubbles up in her throat. She can’t feel the wool, grounding or choking, who cares, who cares, any longer. She can breathe, she can cry, but she’s about to die, so she doesn’t. Her father was a soldier. She will stand up, she will go out of her corner, all by herself, like a grown-ass woman she is. “Maybe it’s not so bad, after all.”

Then she sees his hand.

It’s big and covered in blood, fresh and dried, red and brown. Very much human. He’s silent, maybe voiceless, maybe he can only bark. She’s about to find out, she supposes. “I’m not Jenny,” she thinks and reaches out.

When they touch, she wonders why it feels so much like pulling up an anchor.

 

* * *

 

“Did I kill anybody?” Cora asked earlier this morning, a steaming cup in her hand. She seemed calm, like a pond on a moonless, windless night, but the sun rising behind her, behind your big, dirty window, lit up the challenge in her eyes, put the up-turned twist—just like your mother’s, your other sister’s, nothing like yours—of her mouth into a sharp relief. Coffee turned sour on your tongue, and you put down your mug with more force than you’d intended. “No,” you said, curt.

As if being curt could shorten the six years apart distance between you. As if it were what you wanted.

Cora smirked.

“I’m going out,” you said and fled.

*

You drove and drove, first downtown, among the unfortunate people that had to be in work by six, equally pissed, but more lost than them. Then you said “Fuck it,” and made a U-turn, pushed by what you suppose was an instinct toward the familiar suburb. If you’d thought about what you were going to do, you’d have tried to talk yourself out of it, but in your life so full of what-ifs, connections missed by seconds, and plans twisted by fear having a clear destination was a small blessing, so you didn’t. God help you, you didn’t think.

You’ll feel guilty later, but then—you would anyway.

The school is almost empty and silent when you arrive, and you move quietly up the stairs and down the corridors, as if this place makes you into a ghost. It’s easy enough to follow the strange combination of the memory of your own teenage years here and her scent—something new in well-known surroundings. To settle to wait when you have found the bright classroom. You don’t tune in to listen to her pulse; it’ll be different anyway, not tainted by fear. You just wait.

*

Her heartbeat is exactly as you remember, rabbit-fast, now complete with the sound of her heels clicking on the floor in a staccato rhythm. She’s scared. You think maybe somebody noticed you, after all. Warned her about your presence. You think maybe you should go away, jump out of the window and disappear into the morning. You need to check up on Cora anyway—and this thought makes your throat constrict. By the time you can breathe again, she’s in the classroom with you, her back a graceful line against the wood of the door. She wears a floral—skirt or a dress, you don’t know, but she doesn’t look comfortable in it. She looks like it’s all an act. You feel like a dick, because it relaxes you immediately, and you smile. "It’s not that bad", you tell yourself. "Nobody can see." And even if they could—you, all of you, are always acting. You’re just playing along.

*

Next time you smile is not five minutes later; she can see it, because it’s at her, and the guilt burns hot in the pit of your stomach. She doesn’t notice, asks for your name, and you give it to her, because you can’t not, stupid. Stupid and praying to any god or goddess who might listen to you for this to be the end of it, for this—whatever this is—to go nowhere.

Stupid and hoping.

“Jennifer,” she says, loud and clear, her tone lilting. You close the door behind you.

It’s also an act.

*

When you come home, Cora touches her hand to the back of your neck and pulls you in, until she can put her nose to the pulsepoint under your jaw and breathe in your scent. When she steps back, her eyes are gleaming, and you don’t know why. You are afraid.

 

* * *

 

She’s thinking of her mother when she’s driving to her house, careful, careful, and way below the limit, because she doesn’t trust herself, the steadiness of her hands, her reflexes. Truth be told, she shouldn’t be driving at all, people who were threatened with violent death shouldn’t be allowed to drive to their houses as if nothing’s changed, as if their lives hasn’t been cut into _before_ and _now_ with a smudge of darkness. As if they can go on doing mundane things, silly things, important things, and not stop in the middle, asking themselves why why why. How how how. When again.

Between the two of them, though, she’s the one better off, so she keeps her foot on the gas and thinks of promises her mother made her and never kept, of a promise she’s made herself and is about to break.

*

_I’ll get a job, darling, and we’ll go somewhere far, far away. Where do you wanna live? Talk to me, sweetie. Choose. From now on, you can always choose._

_Water! I wanna see a lot of water!_

_Water, huh? We’ll go live by the ocean, then. Only you and I. Your father will never get to shout at us again, Jenny. Never ever. I promise._

_*_

Derek is unresponsive, immobile like a pillar of salt. Water’s still dripping from his hair, tiny droplets clinging to his eyelashes, the bigger ones sliding down his cheeks, to the corners of his mouth. Water mixed with blood stains his hands, his ripped shirt, his pants. His claws are still out. She doesn’t want to think about his claws, about the fact that he has claws.

That he’s sitting beside her in his car she’s driving, because he can’t. That she’s taking him home, because she couldn’t not to, she couldn’t leave him alone.

Little Jenny had a savior complex. Jennifer is supposed to know better, she talks about it to her therapist and everything. She has a violent father she’s cut herself loose from. She has a boring life in which she teaches a bunch of teenagers about words written by long-dead white dudes she pretends to care about.

Personally, she thinks the best books are about irreparable damage and never get published.

Derek killed—was made to kill, used to kill—goddammit, killed—a boy whose name was Vernon, who had disappeared a few months ago, and who was a subject of gossip in the teacher lounge. She knows this. She also knows Derek can kill her, if not with his own hands, then by association.

She still hasn’t lived by the ocean.

Her bones, her blood, the precise machinery of her body, they all tell her she can’t save him. She used to think she can save herself.

When she pulls over, her street is eerily quiet, the night air as cold as it gets in Northern California in September. She breathes it in until her lungs hurt.

*

The lights in her house are off. She is off. He is off, standing in the middle of her living room, shadows from her blinds across his belly, the upper parts of his body hidden by darkness. Maybe up there, where she can’t see, his head is one of a wolf’s. Maybe the dark changes him, turns his face into a muzzle, elongates his teeth. Maybe the light does. She doesn’t know, but believes everything is possible.

Her therapist often says she needs to—have faith. It’s painful, how believing makes her heart ache now.

*

She doesn’t think sex is an option, but when she climbs into bed beside him, his hands are warm and insistent, and she wants. Derek moves slowly, with purpose, more rocking than fucking, and she gets it, she does, he always talks more with his hands than words. The language invented between their bodies is for them only, sentences beginning on fingertips and ending on smooth expanses of skin, the spaces in-between full of commas and question marks, and she lets the familiarity of the pattern lull her fears away. And maybe it’s too vague, this talking-not-talking and half-formed feeling of joining, but when their orgasms rise and crash like waves, they kiss and cry together, and the salt and blood on their lips seal their unpromises better than wax.

*

In the morning, she takes him—them, them, them—to see the ocean. It’s beautiful.

the end

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://kayfeatures.tumblr.com/), if you wanna!


End file.
